m_f @ m_f @midwest.social

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2 yr. ago

It really couldn't decide on pixelated vs line art

The whole "it's just autocomplete" is just a comforting mantra. A sufficiently advanced autocomplete is indistinguishable from intelligence. LLMs provably have a world model, just like humans do. They build that model by experiencing the universe via the medium of human-generated text, which is much more limited than human sensory input, but has allowed for some very surprising behavior already.

We're not seeing diminishing returns yet, and in fact we're going to see some interesting stuff happen as we start hooking up sensors and cameras as direct input, instead of these models building their world model indirectly through purely text. Let's see what happens in 5 years or so before saying that there's any diminishing returns.

Gary Marcus should be disregarded because he's emotionally invested in The Bitter Lesson being wrong. He really wants LLMs to not be as good as they already are. He'll find some interesting research about "here's a limitation that we found" and turn that into "LLMS BTFO IT'S SO OVER".

The research is interesting for helping improve LLMs, but that's the extent of it. I would not be worried about the limitations the paper found for a number of reasons:

• There doesn't seem to be any reason to believe that there's a ceiling on scaling up
• LLM's reasoning abilities improve with scale (notice that the example they use for kiwis they included the answers from o1-mini and llama3-8B, which are much smaller models with much more limited capabilities. GPT-4o got the problem correct when I tested it, without any special prompting techniques or anything)
• Techniques such as RAG and Chain of Thought help immensely on many problems
• Basic prompting techniques help, like "Make sure you evaluate the question to ignore extraneous information, and make sure it's not a trick question"
• LLMs are smart enough to use tools. They can go "Hey, this looks like a math problem, I'll use a calculator", just like a human would
• There's a lot of research happening very quickly here. For example, LLMs improve at math when you use a different tokenization method, because it changes how the model "sees" the problem

Until we hit a wall and really can't find a way around it for several years, this sort of research falls into the "huh, interesting" territory for anybody that isn't a researcher.

Gary Marcus is an AI crank and should be disregarded

Yeah, it's not impossible, but it's much harder and you get a lot less info. You can also counteract the JS-less tracking with Firefox's privacy.resistFingerprinting, or by using the Tor Browser, which enables a lot of anti-surveillance measures by default. Here's also another good site for discovering how trackable you are: https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/

They're also working with browser developers to push htmx into web standards, so that hopefully soon you won't even need htmx/JS/etc, it'll just be what your browser does by default

A lot of the web is powered by JS, but much less of it needs to be. Here's a couple of sites that are part of a trend to not unnecessarily introduce it:

http://youmightnotneedjs.com/

https://htmx.org/

The negative implications for Google requiring JS is that they will use it to track everything possible about you that they can, even down to how you move your cursor, or how much battery you have left on your phone in order to jack up prices, or any other number of shitty things.

Could very well be a mobile thing. I was pretty annoyed recently when logging into gcal for work on my phone, it refused to let me sign in without giving them my cell phone number. When I switched to wifi, it stopped bugging me, so clearly they pay attention to that sort of signal.

Sometimes, yeah. My default is DDG, and I also use Kagi, but Google is still good at some stuff. Guess I'll take the hit and just stop using it completely though. Kagi has been good enough, and also lets me search the fediverse for finding that dank meme I saw last week. Google used to be able to do that, but can't shove as many ads in those queries I assume, so they dropped that ability.

Related

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/mickey

Another good one is Glasgow -> Glaswegians. Here's a pretty interesting article about a few odd demonyms:

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/demonyms-linguistics-nicknames

The demonym “Glaswegian” comes, linguists think, as an analogy of the Irish city of Galway. “Glasgow” and “Galway” are two fairly similar looking words. And Galway has long had its own analogy with another similar-looking word: Norway. Galway’s demonym is “Galwegian,” as an analogy of “Norwegian.” So “Glaswegian” is a sort of a photocopy-of-a-photocopy of Norwegian. Not something anyone could ever guess!

What is !steamdeck@lemmy.world doing over with the red dots 🤔

I read that and was prepared to have my mind blown. Not really impressed, though. That article says this:

And you can literally say anything about North Korea, the most absurd thing you could imagine, and people would believe it.

That links to this article, which says:

The country has been in the news of late, as ongoing negotiations between the Trump and Kim Jong-un administrations appear to have soured. The chief casualty of this diplomatic failure, the New York Times (5/31/19) breathlessly reported, was Kim Jong-un’s negotiating team, with the vice chair of the North Korean Workers’ Party, Kim Yong-chol, being sent to a forced labor camp in “the latest example of how a senior North Korean official’s political fortune is made or broken at the whims of Kim Jong-un.”

The linked NYT article says this:

Now, he has suddenly become the latest example of how a senior North Korean official’s political fortune is made or broken at the whims of Kim Jong-un. This week, leading South Korean newspapers reported Kim Yong-chol’s fall from grace. One of them, the conservative daily Chosun Ilbo, went so far as to report that Mr. Kim had been banished to forced labor, with many of his negotiating team members either executed or sent to prison camps.

South Korean officials and analysts cautioned that it was too early to say with precision what was happening inside Kim Jong-un’s opaque regime. South Korean news media offered differing conjectures, including whether Kim Hyok-chol, the North’s special nuclear envoy to the United States, had been executed by firing squad in March, as the Chosun Ilbo reported, or was still under interrogation.

But they all agree on one thing: Kim Yong-chol and his negotiating team, which had driven Kim Jong-un’s diplomatic outreach toward Washington, have been sidelined, as the North Korean leader sought a scapegoat to blame for his disastrous second summit meeting with Mr. Trump, held in Hanoi, Vietnam, in February.

That seems pretty reasonable? It says that the official has found disfavor, says what one other paper reported with language of "went so far as to report", and also notes that it's hard to say for sure because North Korea is very opaque.

The FAIR article then says:

There was one problem: Kim Yong-chol appeared only a few days later at a high profile art performance alongside Kim Jong-un.

Yeah, that's hard evidence he wasn't executed, but that's about it. Situations like this can change on a whim in a dictatorship. Maybe Kim Jong-un had a good breakfast and decided that the official's forced labor could be done.

FAIR also says this in that article:

North Korea is also a favorite location for wacky and easily disprovable stories. The BBC (3/28/14) originally reported that all men were required to wear their hair like Kim Jong-un, with other haircuts banned.

The BBC article has a correction that it's university students and not all men (which is missing from the FAIR article), so is that true? And it's weird to say that stuff like that is wacky when stuff like this apparently happens:

A second, and unprecedented, TV series this winter showed hidden-camera style video of "long-haired" men in various locations throughout Pyongyang.

In a break with North Korean TV's usual approach, the programme gave their names and addresses, and challenged the fashion victims directly over their appearance.

That looks legit, with footage on youtube. Is there any reason to think that's fake? That certainly confirms my mental model of North Korea as a wacky dictatorship if it's true.

EDIT: FAIR's other statements in that article are dunking on the worst possible interpretations of what people say, which just makes FAIR seem like it has a chip on its shoulder about North Korea for some reason. I'd take what they say about North Korea with a grain of salt.

we believe revolution is the solution

Yes, that's the issue.

smug liberal enlightened centrist argument

That's on you for assuming that just because you don't like an argument it must be those smug libs.

tankies of being bootlickers and what not: we

I didn't call you a tankie, you self-identified as one

Do I see smug pricks like yourself going around calling his ass a cultist? No!

I call out silliness when I see it, but most lib stuff that I come across is of the bland, inoffensive variety. I haven't been checking this entire thread for everyone that's wrong, I've spent enough time on this already.

The easiness of the solution isn't how much work is involved. By "neat and easy" I mean, "The root of all evil is capitalism and we solve that with revolution".

Black and white thinking pops up again. Why do you think I think socialist states are evil? Why do you think I think everything America does is reasonable?

It's another cult-like behavior that is rampant with tankies. "This person thinks this, so I will assign these other views to them as well, so that I may dunk on them".

So here's the thing. Hexbear has some smart people on it. @PugJesus@lemmy.world wrote a good comment over here that talks about how it's good that they can see injustices in the world and get pissed off: https://lemmy.world/comment/12220633

But cults suck in smart people, and they're very skilled at this. They feed off of righteous anger at the state of the world, and promise neat, easy solutions. And the issue is that you can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into, especially people that suffer from black and white thinking. You can't talk about how the world doesn't neatly fit into tidy categories, because that's not as comforting as what the cult offers. The only thing you can really do is reinforce that they've fallen into a broken system of thinking, and encourage them to want to reason themselves out of their current position. Once that desire is there, they'll accomplish it all on their own.

The term is “dialectic”. Are you sure you are familiar with the topic you are being condescending about?

This is a great example of the hyperfocus on irrelevant details that plagues these comments. It was intentional, but even if it wasn't, so what? "Your argument has a typo, therefore you're dunked!"?

You’re meant to ask why.

The issue is that the comment is pablum. It doesn't actual say anything, it's not informative. It's hoping you'll infer something yourself and then waste time assuming what they meant. As mentioned in a previous comment, I realize that one of the things it's trying to get you to infer is that decadent western media is bad or whatever, but it's not limited to that. Arguing that there's only one thing it's trying to communicate is a great example of the black and white thinking that plagues tankies.

"You’re meant to ask why" is so embarrassingly vapid that I'm surprised you're defending it. Of course people will focus on big issues like "let's try to make sure this country continues to exist" over "let's try to help this country improve itself". There will hopefully be time for more of that later after Putin's invasion fails. I mean come on, this is pretty basic stuff. Do you think I'd be arguing in good faith if I said "Yeah, what's happening in Palestine is bad, but have you seen their LGBTQ record"? It's also again, not saying something, it's just JAQing off.

Right so some sarcastic little jokes. The kind of thing all over Lemmy.

I was told there'd be informative comments with sources. There were not. The vast majority of the comments didn't even try to be substantive, just pigs wallowing in mud.

A sentiment found nowhere in the statement you quoted

I elided some of the comment that makes it more clear:

After getting teased and given the run around for decades he slowly wised up to the game. Putin realized by 2014 they wouldn’t let him be a European but until late 2023 he still didn’t understand that the west could never be trusted.

This is imperialist sympathizing, and the OP should feel ashamed. "Putin just had to invade Ukraine because of those other meanie imperialists that didn't want him in their club!"

Also "crypto fascists who run NATO will never forgive the Slavic peoples for destroying the third reich" is just straight facepalm material.

The majority of responses are of this ilk:

WHAT ABOUT ISM MUCH!!!111?!?1;1!?;1!1?1!1!11?1?1?!1!1?1?1?1!1!!1!1!1?1?1??1!1!1!11!?1?1!1?1?1

<custom ukraine flag emoji>

had no business being nazi fucks murdering their own people and working for

<custom us flag emoji>

to provoke Russia

Obomba had no business overthrowing the democratically elected Viktor Yakunovich

They're not detailed, sourced, or coherent, they're just bandwagoning. They're pigs wallowing in the mud, enjoying getting others muddy.

One response has images like this and links to news articles:

It is sourced, I'll give you that. It doesn't try to actually make any argument though, it's just hoping you'll see the headlines that think "ukraine == nazis", without stating that outright. It's oddly similar to Young Earth Creationists.

Here's another response that's the sort of thing you write when you first learn "omg capitalism is bad you guys!" and view all of the world's ills through that lens. much dialect wow:

Anyone who had a look at Lenin’s “Imperialism: highest stage of capitalism” and took it seriously, knew that there would be war in Europe as soon as they realized that the means of production of the former USSR were auctioned in a corrupt fashion, and their structure of ownership went not to western hands, but to national interests that collide with those of the US. Since that moment, it was just a matter of time that there would be conflict.

Poor oppressed Putin!

Putin tried really had to be taken into the fold imperialism. He assisted the west in its looting of Russia. He tried to join NATO but the crypto fascists who run NATO will never forgive the Slavic peoples for destroying the third reich

I've waded through the responses now to make sure I'm not missing something worthwhile, and it was a waste of my time. The one thing of value any of these responses has is hopefully one day making the posters feel self cringe when they've matured.

“Ukraine isn’t a utopia, therefore it’s a dystopia”.

That collection of news headlines are trying to imply "Ukraine isn't perfect, therefore Putin's invasion is justified because Ukraine is full Nazi and also the western media is trying to cover it up!". It's an immature view of the world, where something being imperfect means it's literally hitler. It's something you get past as you grow up, for the most part. I know some adult tankies IRL so it's not a given that people grow out of it, but each and every single one of them suffers from black and white thinking that negatively impacts their life in many ways.

Let's agree that Putin wanting to bring back the USSR is silly. I'm not really defending OP, but calling the responses in that thread "detailed replies" is... oof. They're detailed in the same way Time Cube is detailed. OP wandered into the pig sty and got muddy, but at least he's not one of the pigs wallowing in the mud.